September 8, 2017

Is amnesty suicide for the Dems or for the GOP?

Now that the DACA people are going to be amnestied, the next move by globalists will be to broaden it to other groups who are slightly lower on the sympathy scale, potentially including all 20 million illegals by the final round.

Immigration hardliners argue that mass amnesty is suicide for the GOP, since immigrants lean so heavily Democrat. They are trying to argue to Republican party leaders that, even if they despise their voters, they should at least back off of amnesty in order to ensure their own survival as a major party.

This is a naive argument, which explains why it is never listened to by the GOP. Most immigrants, legal or illegal, are heavily concentrated in safe states -- mostly deep blue ones like California and New York, but also deep red ones like Texas and Utah. Millions more newly legalized citizens with voting rights in California will be no big loss to the GOP there, as the party effectively no longer exists in that state.

What about turning red states like Texas into blue ones? That also will not happen, because most of these immigrants are Hispanic, and Hispanics do not vote, even when they are eligible. This covers blue state cases as well -- they will not get even further blue, as their Hispanic immigrants will not vote either.

The most recent year of good voting data is for the 2012 presidential election, as studied by the General Social Survey, the gold standard in social research (large national probability samples going back to the 1970s). Let's review the cold hard facts on voting participation. We will stick just to people who are even eligible to vote, assuming the best-case scenario for immigrant advocates who want them to be able to vote.

Among immigrants -- those residing outside the US at age 16 -- only 46% voted, vs. 71% of native citizens.

Within the Hispanic population, only 28% of immigrants voted, vs. 51% of native citizens.

Again, those are all considering people who are already eligible to vote.

The voting rates for all groups are lower in the West South Central region, which is basically Greater Texas. So the largest red state is in no danger of being flipped blue by low-voting Hispanics, immigrants, or Hispanic immigrants.

The only large state that could be affected is the swing state of Florida -- but then Florida has always been a swing state, back when it was mostly white, and right up through 2016 with its heavy Hispanic and immigrant population. So the GOP may reason that it has little to lose there if there are more immigrants.

An earlier post showed that large non-citizen populations do not affect how a state votes, but rather how much of a force multiplier it has. The number of Congressmen sent to the House is determined by resident population, not citizen population, so that states with lots of immigrants get more Representatives in Congress than they should. That is reflected in their weight within the Electoral College when it comes time to choosing a President as well.

But the GOP has already given up trying to be a national party that can field viable candidates for President. They lucked into the presidency in 2000 when the full Florida recount showed that Gore won among voters. They could have legitimately won in 2004, although who can say how much of that was due to the incumbency effect that resulted from the botched election of 2000. But maybe W. Bush could have been the Republican Jimmy Carter and won by a hair, serving only one despised term during an otherwise unbroken string of victories for the other party.

Of course Trump did better than W. Bush could have ever dreamed of, but he ran against the GOP, and the GOP did everything it could to stop him, and continues to subvert him well after he's taken office in the White House. So they still have no pretensions of being a national party to contest the presidency.

And although making Congressional representation reflect citizens only, rather than any old residents, could give Republicans better numbers in Congress, it also might not. The main shift would be fewer reps from the Sun Belt, with its enormous immigrant populations, and more reps back to the Rust Belt, where hardly any residents are immigrants.

In some Rust Belt areas like Ohio and Indiana, that would give more Republicans to Congress. But it would also mean more reps from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. Maybe those new districts would go to Trump-style Republicans -- but that's a nightmare for the GOP leadership. Otherwise they would go to Democrats. Almost certainly not would they become new corporate-friendly warmonger Republicans that the leadership desires.

So the GOP can rationally argue there is little downside to its electoral prospects from giving amnesty to all illegals and even throwing the borders wide open. At least up until the point where immigrants do begin to overwhelm the safe red states in voting numbers (different from resident numbers, since immigrants don't vote).

What about the upside? Well, the GOP is all about cutting labor costs to employers to boost corporate profits. They represent various specific sectors like the Pentagon and energy and agriculture, but they also represent a sector-general class of managers and investors. This managerial and investing class will continue to make a killing pursuing the off-shoring policies it has been getting for several decades now. Instead of off-shoring, it can also bring the cheap foreign labor here through immigration.

In addition to making managers and investors in general happy, the GOP program of open borders and free trade will also make one of its major elite factions happy -- agriculture. These mega-farms are highly profitable not only because of heavy subsidies from the government, but also because they hire cheap foreigners to toil in the corn fields, dairy pastures, and meatpacking plants.

The free trade agreements have all served to remove manufacturing from the US and give it to the other cheap countries, while improving agricultural exports from the US and wiping out the farms of the newly industrialized cheap countries. "Trade" is not general, it is specifically taking the form of American food traded for manufactured products from the cheap countries (clothing, cars, electronics, etc.). That's why Trump always used to complain that while Asia sends us cars by the shipload, "all we send them is beef".

From the GOP's perspective, car companies and auto workers unions do not contribute to the Republican coffers or political capital within Washington, while the mega-farms of agribusiness do, so why would Republican leaders try to make Detroit happy instead of Omaha? Especially when these large-scale farms and ranches all lie within the Great Plains, where the reddest of red states are found, while manufacturing plants are in purple states at best, and deep blue states at worst.

The Republican party's grand vision is to reverse the Industrial Revolution and have a nation's residents toiling in the fields, or performing menial servant labor waiting on people with money. They want us to go back to the feudal ages, where the GOP will enjoy the support of the landed aristocracy.

Therefore, it makes perfect sense that they would want to import hordes of field-toilers and servant-peasants from parts of the world that never launched their own Industrial Revolution. Especially when there is no electoral downside. Any self-preservation argument to the GOP leadership is doomed to failure, because they know better than you do what is good for their own preservation. They will only chuckle at your naivete.

* * * * *

On the other hand, large-scale immigration is a disaster to the Democrat party, whether they know it or not.

Sure, you could say as I just did about the GOP, "They would know better than you what is in their own interests as a party," but then the Democrats just got wiped out in a historic upset, losing many states that were solid blue for decades -- Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, a district in Maine, and essentially Minnesota (spoiled only by a third-party conservative).

So far, zero states have flipped from red to blue due to demographic replacement by immigrants. Rather, it has been white liberal yuppie carpetbaggers who have recently flipped red states blue. They are a far larger population size, they are all eligible to vote, and they turn out at high rates.

But now we've seen six medium-sized states defect en masse from the blue column, showing that it is the Democrats who are truly out of touch with what preserves their party. Not immigrants, but the (white) working class in the Industrial Midwest, who have much higher labor union membership rates than others around the country. Like yuppies, union members are already eligible to vote, are organized politically, and turn out at high rates. If you lose enough union rank-and-file support, kiss the Midwest goodbye.

There are about 15 million union members today, equal to estimates of the illegal immigrant population. Which group is more important to keep, if their interests are opposed and will not come as a combined bloc?

Back to the GSS statistics: for eligible voters, 81% voted among people who are union members or are married to one, vs. 67% among non-union households. And they are not clustered in deep blue or deep red states. Compared to non-union voters, union-linked voters were more likely to come from blue safe-havens like the Mid-Atlantic and Pacific regions, but also from the East North Central region (OH, MI, IN, IL, WI), and presumably the Great Lakes by extension.

Only Illinois is a deep blue state, and Indiana a deep red state. Ohio is usually a swing state, and although Michigan and Wisconsin voted reliably blue, it was not by a large margin -- enough for Trump to steal them away by appealing to Rust Belt working class whites.

As an inverse of the GOP, the Democrat party does not rely on the generalized corporate managerial and investing class, although it does have the backing of specific factions like Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It also relies on labor unions, and enough of them are still industrial unions rather than public sector service unions -- at least in the key Rust Belt states, rather than safe states like California.

Once those manufacturing plants are destroyed through off-shoring, the new workers in the cheap countries will not be joining unions, let alone voting in American elections for the pro-union party. So there goes millions of reliable Democrat voters. Even if the plants are kept in America, but operated by cheap foreign labor, the immigrant workers will not be unionized, and again -- bye-bye millions of reliable Democrat voters, in crucial states no less.

It is out of self-preservation that the Democrats have opposed the free trade deals for decades. Enough of them are neoliberals who vote with the majority of Republicans to push them through, and only neoliberals are allowed to become Democrat Presidents. But the majority of Congressional Democrats in both houses have opposed them, from NAFTA to permanent normal trade relations with China to CAFTA to South Korea to Trade Promotion Authority for negotiating the TPP.

Yep, the Republicans are so rotten that they make us find a few good things about the voting records of some of the most horrendous Democrats ever to serve -- Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, Harry Reid, Sherrod Brown, even Bob Menendez, voted against most or all of these anti-factory / pro-mega-farm deals.

It's not that the Democrats look after their constituents better than the GOP does. It's that the Democrats' constituents include large numbers of organized labor in high-paying sectors like manufacturing, whereas the GOP looks after the landed aristocracy in the Plains. The only sector with a large number of employees who vote reliably Republican, and whom the GOP looks after, is the military.

But that just means the GOP tries to inflate military bubbles so that more and more members of the military have "something to do somewhere around the world," rather than use them effectively for specific purposes when our national interests are clearly defined and large in magnitude. Most of that labor is not put toward truly productive use, and those guys could be creating far more value as engineers for an auto company, logistics experts for steel mills, and quality-control for tool production.

That is a large chunk of potential Democrat industry-related voters that could be stolen from the GOP if only the Democrats would more forcefully promote the re-industrialization of the economy, and demand an America-first defense policy to replace our failed and crumbling globalist empire.

* * * * *

It turns out that the Democrats have more to lose in the short and medium term from amnestying the millions of illegals, opening the borders, and off-shoring our manufacturing. That's why the GOP has always been the main vehicle for the cheap labor lobby. If the Democrats don't reverse course on immigration, they will lose the Rust Belt forever.

They are pursuing amnesty and open borders out of identity politics and multiculturalism, which is a crazy parasitic growth destroying their party. They are not doing it out of rational electoral calculations, let alone being part of the cheap labor lobby -- or else they would have signed onto all of those free trade deals.

On the one hand, it makes it more likely to get through to them since there is a rational basis for them to give up amnesty, vs. little rational basis for Republican leaders to give it up. On the other hand, if the party is emotionally hijacked by identity politics warriors, they may not be able to respond rationally. It's all still up in the air at this point, although the number of progressives coming out with "yeah but" arguments about immigration (Thomas Frank, Peter Beinart) is a welcome sign.

The Trump movement has already burned down the Republican party, which refused to serve the people. Now that Trump is beginning to cut deals with "Chuck and Nancy" rather than Ryan and McConnell, maybe the next phase of the movement will be rehabilitating the Democrat party. "Factories over foreigners" and "Medicare for all except those who must go back" -- that's how they win back the Midwest.

25 comments:

its interesting that Hispanics don't vote that much. In his book "The Next 100 Years", George Friedman, of Stratfor, argues that it is because many of them still feel more political loyalty to Mexico rather than the U.S. - they see immigration as retaking old Mexican provinces, rather than going to a new country.

In the future, Friedman says that the Mexican government might even create Congressional seats to represent the Hispanics in the American Southwest.

This is very excellent and is why it's so important Trump loosened his bonds to the GOP.

"On the other hand, if the party is emotionally hijacked by identity politics warriors, they may not be able to respond rationally. It's all still up in the air at this point, although the number of progressives coming out with "yeah but" arguments about immigration (Thomas Frank, Peter Beinart) is a welcome sign."

Oh, man. They had done a great job suppressing this, knowing rationally it's not what people want, until the implosion of the Russia hack narrative and... they've been talking about Confederate/ Conquistador/ Founding Fathers statue removal since.How many weeks ago was that?Yeah, they did not handle that well at all.

I can't sign my name cuz, you know. But I'm doing alright.I kind of feel like me, you, a lot of us, are in Twin Peaks.

I live in very heavily Hispanic Yakima WA. Despite the demographics, Trump won this county by double digits. Sometimes I hear Hispanics complain about Trump. I ask them if they voted and they always say no.Voting and politics is not a part of their culture.

I live with a Hispanic family. I remember on election night they watched a situation comedy on TV and weren't even interested in the election results. I have been a political junkie all my life (even as a child) but I actually find the Hispanic apathy toward politics and non-participation in voting to be sort of a charming quality for some reason.

I should add that I know two Hispanics who totally got into the election and did in fact vote...for Trump! They are both young and spent their whole life in the U.S...one is a very attractive girl in her 20s.

I think I just realized what I like about how few Hispanics vote (other than how this impacts elections). This is related to why I like Hispanics in general. It is not a striver culture, they are nothing like pretentious liberal whites who use politics to virtue signal.

The more that demographics change toward non-white, the more whites will vote as a bloc.

Who are the most reliable non-white Democrat voters? Blacks. Where are blacks the largest share of the population? In the South. What region is completely off the table for Democrats? Also the South, because whites said "fair is fair" and began voting as a bloc like the blacks.

Texas would do the same thing if Hispanic immigrants poured in enough to make them a near-majority.

In a place like California where whites might effectively go extinct, that just means the Democrat party will split into warring factions -- the black party, the Hispanic party, the Asian party, etc. That's already underway, in fact.

It would stay blue in presidential elections (no gain for the Dems), but it might actually lose Democrats in Congress because their Reps and Senators would be hailing from The Black Party or The Hispanic Party or The Asian Party, rather than The Democrats.

Sure, they'd caucus with Dems, but they would not necessarily be in lockstep with them. Especially if the Dems try to win back working-class whites (otherwise they're finito), which might provoke their fellow caucus members from The Black / Hispanic / Asian Party to revolt. And that would be a big loss to the Dems, who focus so much on strict party discipline.

Every legislative amnesty that has been attempted in the last two decades has failed, always because of Republican congressmen. Why will this one be different?

This is a naive argument, which explains why it is never listened to by the GOP

The GOPe rejected as naive warnings about Trump's candidacy through all of 2015.

also deep red ones like Texas

Is it deep red? Trump won 30 states. In eight of them, his margin of victory was narrower than in Texas. In 21 of them, it was wider. Texas whites already go 70%-30% Republican, not quite the South but more Republican than whites in other states with large Hispanic populations.

This time will be different because the Overton Window has shifted so far toward amnesty among Congressmen, even since 2013, forget since 2006. Probably true for the general public too.

Party make-up is basically the same as '13, where all Dems and enough Repubs are allowed to cross over, with the rest of the R's voting against in order to maintain the facade. Similar to most R's and some D's passing trade deals.

Unless there's another Cantor event, the R leadership might not be afraid. And that really was a fluke -- a member of leadership getting beat in a primary, let alone by a nobody, let alone on the issue of immigration.

Plus before it was Bush and Obama pushing amnesty, so that allowed the people to get angry over the globalist President pushing foreigners over citizens.

But now it's Mr. Immigration Hardliner, Trump himself, pushing amnesty for DACA. And just look at how many Trump voters, whether reluctant ones or the fanatic ones, never miss a beat when any news item breaks whatsoever. The forecast is raining whitepills again, it's another 4-D chess move, etc. Any bad news is proof you're fake base, "who do you really support?" etc.

I don't think most of the hardcore Trump supporters are that brainless -- it's actually more of a clever-silly phenomenon affecting the educated Trump fans.

But are there enough of them, especially in key sectors like the media, that they could drain any popular revolt over amnesty for DACA people? Definitely.

We can't tell what magnitude the result will be, but it's clear what direction it will point in -- toward amnesty, away from deportation.

But it's not going anywhere for Republicans, and even if it did, it would not be due to Hispanics or immigrants, but white yuppies.

One of the few big counties in the nation that flipped red to blue was a wealthy suburb of Houston, similar to Orange County and the three counties in suburban Atlanta. Sun Belt transplant yuppies. That's who threatens the Republican dominance of Texas.

We're nowhere near the non-striving climate that would enable tremendous strides in populism. The fact that NFL ratings have been down for two years indicates that proles are beginning to move on from idolizing elites. As was the enthusiasm for interlopers Bernie and Trump among non-ideologues.

But this sentiment takes a long time to absorb among elites, the majority of whom (with the exception of a few like Robert Mercer or well, Trump) still insist on plugging their ears and shouting la la la la la la la la when proles try and reach them.

And in fact, even on the Right, about 50% (give or take depending on who's asking and how it's asked) aren't that opposed to DACA. So we've got a long way to go.

Amnesty this time is more likely b/c it's not comprehensive but just for the DACA people -- say 1 million max, vs. the 10-20 million total -- and they're chosen to be the most sympathetic cases, vs. any illegal no matter how awful.

In fact, the only group that can kill amnesty this time around is the Democrats -- they could get greedy and pull for a far more comprehensive amnesty than just the DACA people / 1 million.

R's would be happy to give them just the DACA people, but you know how identity politics can make the Dems act irrational.

Yes, I was going to say Austinization and the population growth via immigration will keep nudging Texas in the direction of California, a reliably Republican state a generation ago.

Your perspicacity often floors me. I'm hoping you're wrong about this, but I'm not that confident that you are.

That said, I don't see a benefit in being fatalistic about this. Every time an amnesty comes up, Rep congress critters are pushed by donors and pulled by voters on it. For this amnesty to be stopped, we have to pull like hell. If a DACA amnesty is defeated, the door is open for all kinds of restrictionism--we'll have the judiciary, executive, and legislative all having shot it down in one form or another.

Interesting analysis. A couple comments though:(1) Even though Florida has been unpredictable, it doesn't mean the effect of adding more non-Cuban hispanics is unpredictable. Those will push it toward the Dems. And Florida really matters.

(2) I too like the Latino culture that isn't very political. What we see on TV though is "latino strivers", and they are very unpleasant. Also the numbers say they are the latinos who do vote. And 46% voting is less than others, but it's far from "not voting".

(3) The Dems cannot be on this ridiculous identity politics binge just because they're deluded, and they are not. Big international communists are behind it, for example George Soros. They spend big sums to keep it going. So reforming the Dems isn't just a matter of reaching out to them.

(4) Trump started reaching out to Dems when his main Rep. ally, McConnell, turned away from him by refusing to recess the Senate for August. McConnell, and every other senator including all the Republicans. Any single senator could have forced a recess. This really hurt Trump, because it stopped him filling posts by recess appointment. He probably had 100 of those ready to go, but McConnell kicked him in the face and facilitated Dem. obstruction. And what's worse, Trump had appointed McConnell's wife to his cabinet and thought he had an ally. So this was an act of cold hostility from the Republicans.

I think Trump should just retreat and govern a while by EO and regulation, while letting Congress stew in its own juice. They are all terrible, with few exceptions, esp. in the Senate. But Trump feels the need to reach out and make a deal on immigration, and I don't get it. Maybe Schumer and Pelosi threatened him? Schumer did say they have "six ways from Sunday" to get him.

The elites will continue not to absorb populism as long as they don't have to, and even then since it's directly against their interests they will fight. They are already fighting in various subtle ways, I am sure. We see this in the stuff that is coming at Trump from all sides, now including Republicans.

Bannon alluded to this in his 60 Minutes interview, saying that Trump was naive that he thought he could get his way thru personal interactions as he has succeeded in his earlier life, but here he's dealing with big institutions. I think Trump was not naive, but he underestimated the venality esp. of McConnell who threw him under the bus in August, and he didn't really have another choice because he has no big US institutions on his side. He may try to enlist foreign institutions to domestic politics to support him (Israel, Saudi Arabia) and he's found it easier to remake the politics in those countries than to unfreeze the issues here in the USA.

"The Dems cannot be on this ridiculous identity politics binge just because they're deluded, and they are not"

Its also being effected by cultural changes caused by the declining crime rate and a phenomenon known as "cocooning". Since the mid-90s, the population has become more reclusive, more infantile, and more delusional, and the rise in identity politics is tied to this more than anything else, IMO.

The good news is that once the crime rate begins to rise, and it should rise pretty soon(mid-century crime decline lasted about 25 years, and its been 25 years since the current crime decline), identity politics will blow away in the wind.

Crime already is getting worse. Downtown Minneapolis had virtually non-existent crime from 2001-2013, which then got substantially worse in subsequent years; a woman was recently knifed and robbed in a parking area. As criminals get emboldened they'll start holding up more yuppies.

Keep in mind just how long it takes for all this to sink in. Purse snatchings and parking ramp prowlers are well-known to anyone who grew up watching 80's movies, but in the 70's a lot of people seemed to think that we'd grow out of crime ("it's just the teen/twenty-something Boomers causing trouble"), or that it was some weird and annoying fad that would blow over and probably not affect us too much.

I've been looking into the EAR-Original Night Stalker case (not Richard Ramirez, this guy was a white Boomer who raped 50+women in the late 70's and 80's) known to be active in California, who has never been caught. A Boomer cop said that she grew up in Sacramento in the 70's, and before the rapes were publicized in 1977-1978, she and most of her neighbors and acquaintances tended to feel safe and comfortable. Most Boomers are naïve about how bad crime was in the 70's, because many did not have kids back then and many of them spent most or all of their lives in the suburbs or in small towns. There's also the vanity of not acknowledging how many Boomers were scuzzy criminals. When X-ers began to commit crimes in the 80's, it was a lot easier for the culture to focus the spotlight on crime.

Also, by the 80's so many people knew of other people who had been victimized that it was becoming impossible to ignore it or explain it away.

And for the record, paradoxically our pop-culture becomes "gratuitiously" licentious and unpretentiously violent in the 2nd and 3rd decades of a high crime period, with the 1st half of the next decade being a transition to a more sanitized culture. So the 1910's and 20's had relatively little censorship of gangsters, prostitutes, gamblers, short-tempered brawlers, and the like. As did the 1970's and 80's. The early 30's and early 90's saw increasing efforts to tone down pop-culture; in the austere and chaste mid-Century, virtually all sex and violence was presented either not at all or in the most prosaic terms.

In the decadent mid-90's thru present, we get campy and overblown, often dour and off-putting depictions of sexual content and violence. Weirdly, though, overt nudity is less common then it was in the 80's, and when their is nudity it isn't naturalistic nudity, e.g. sleeping nude, changing, showering, tentative/low-key sex between youngsters, or sincerely wild romps between older characters. And god forbid yer modern horror movies have kids being believably and even likably hedonistic. In the fourth Friday the 13th, we get as I recall, at least 3 different nudity scenes: all the kids skinny dipping (which comes after a jump cut) and egging each other on like 80's kids would, with young Corey Feldman stumbling on the carousing no less. There's a modest shower sex scene (scene thru frosted glass) with no wild thrusting or screaming, and last, Crispin Glover and his one night stand are first seen awkwardly starting sex, and then we cut away and later return to orgasming, with the girl being briefly topless either before or after the sex. Flushed faces, and we can relate to the tension of inexperienced kids fumbling around and being insecure. Later on, Crispin Glover brags to his friend who didn't get any, but the characters are more enjoyably ditzy than annoyingly macho.

Nowadays, evidently 90% of actresses won't do nudity, or won't do it unless they're playing off-putting character or are in off-putting situations. There's also "joke" nudity involving men ('cuz schlongs aren't sexy to the Judd Apatow types, and after all what better way to annoy "homophobic" frat-boy types who watch these smarmy and faux-sophisticated comedies) or older people. Whereas in the 80's hey-day of sex comedies, no matter how stupid and low-brow they could be, at least you got to see many pairs of young breasts and even some bush (Booger in Revenge of the Nerds, who could forget?).

One of the biggest indictiments of entertainment of the last 25 years is how damn hard it is to, uh, get hard watching it. There are few younger babes who look and act natural on display, and we don't get to see the goods like we used to. People blame it on internet porn, yet beginning in the early 90's there was a drop in naturalistic depictions of nudity and hedonism, even in goddam horror movies which last I checked should at least satisfy the base needs of horny teens.

Who are the most reliable non-white Democrat voters? Blacks. Where are blacks the largest share of the population? In the South. What region is completely off the table for Democrats? Also the South, because whites said "fair is fair" and began voting as a bloc like the blacks.

Southern whites have always voted as a bloc. They just switched parties during the Civil Rights era.

"centious and unpretentiously violent in the 2nd and 3rd decades of a high crime period, with the 1st half of the next decade being a transition to a more sanitized culture."

I've wondered what will happen when the crime rate begins to rise this time around - will we have to go through something like the 60s again, or will the culture just pick up exactly where it left off at the late 80s and early 90s?

The 80s could represent the "final form" of the way human culture is supposed to be(excepting the status-striving), so hopefully we pick up right where we left off.

Not really, because no two decades or eras are exactly alike. America (and other Western countries) are not at all like they were in the 50's or 60's, demographically, culturally, or whatever. Back then we were riding a wave of economic boom (or recovery, depending on the country) and felt like we could do anything. These days, X-ers and Millennials feel gypped and cynical, like they've been part of some sinister experiment whether they wanted to or not. And there's plenty of intra-generational hostility, with strivers complaining about efforts to rein in striving and decadence, while others feel very resentful of strivers trying to grab while the grabbing's good, seemingly oblivious to the crash and/or insurrection we're hurtling toward. It's key to remember that Silents and Boomers by the 1960's all felt that the material ease of that time was not a fair trade for the G.I. generation's disinterest in encouraging individual ambition, self-discovery, and creative and spiritual experimentation.

Meanwhile, these days X-ers and Millennials all feel that the Boomer's restless pursuit of whatever floats their boat has gotten stale and tiring. Being that we're in a posturing era (unlike the 1960's), we have to deal with some hypocrisy and glibness here. Early X-ers have long talked a good game about not being yuppies like them Boomers were, but c'mon. Many of you want to be the best and the coolest, you just go about it somewhat differently than the Boomers did. To be fair, X-ers arent' going to make some of the biggest mistakes that Silents and Boomers did. Primarily, X-ers are doing much more to protect kids and to stigmatize anything that smacks of the disgraceful Ford-Carter era's attitude towards kids. I just saw a cut of several different local TV specials from the early 80's South dealing with the the epidemic of kids and teenagers being found dead in cities known for underage male hustler trafficking (Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston). One Texas news reporter said that articles about pedophilia got angry letters to the editor (angry about being forced to confront the stuff, not anger that kids were being hurt). The main special they used was aired in October 1981, featuring several Texas researchers. This was before the Satanic panic and child-sacrifice nonsense diverted attention away from the large numbers of adult men abusing and often killing underage runaways/drug addicts, etc. Of course, by the early 80's it was well-known that an undetermined number of male predators was killing males and females, but the MSM by the mid-80's had successfully covered up the often shoddy invesigations into dead young males and the fact that large groups of male pedophiles (some of whom were elites) were responsible for hurting many boys. Occasionally, a high-profile scandal became public but there generally was never significant follow-up into everyone involved. The professor interviewed said that many media, religious, educational, and legal institutions all appeared to have been infiltrated by pedos and pedo sympathizers; he said that he looked into Texas university's files and research about the subject and mostly found material defending male pedophiles.

Fortunately, by the mid-80's people were no longer tolerating the sick shit promoted by dirty old Silents in the 70's. Most Boomers realized after 1984 that to a large degree they had been conned; too many people were getting hurt, and they sure as hell did not want these things to happen to kids anymore.

This is the '81 TV special I referenced. It's pretty interesting, because you can watch the transition from the 70's to the 80's, seemingly before your eyes.

3 of the talking heads are more relaxed (concerned, yes, but still stoic), while the professor at times acts like a guy who's seen too much....More than he was supposed to see (he ended up being shot in a home invasion, but survived). It wasn't the care-free 70's quite so much anymore; you couldn't just shrug your shoulders and accept things anymore, not when we were hit by a sense of deep shame for looking the other way for 5+ years.

Now, it is interesting to consider what might happen in the coming decades when Millennials/Gen Z no longer have X-ers setting the tone. Will they eventually do what Silents and early Boomers did in the 70's? ("avenge" a boring period by removing all restraints on morality). These periods of extreme hedonism are so, uh, wrong, that they quickly burn themselves out and fuel future waves of moral crusaders who end up being the brunt of ridicule because they weren't there when we needed them most (kids had no defenders in the 70's).

The article initially tries to not make a big deal about gays, then near the end the American Psych. Assoc. admits that gay men are more likely to be chronic predators than are straight men and dykes. Yes this appeared in the frikkin' NY Times.

What makes the 80's stand out is that people simultaneously had a lot of fun and grasped taboos (regarding fags, dirty bums, criminals, drug addicts, bodily functions, etc.). It's why sex and violence in 80's movies is generally not that off-putting.

"One Texas news reporter said that articles about pedophilia got angry letters to the editor (angry about being forced to confront the stuff, not anger that kids were being hurt)."

That's interesting, because nowadays its become very common to include that kind of stuff in cop dramas or to show it in the news.

Its easier for cocooners to view it from a distant vantage point, because they are less afraid of it actually happening in their real lives. for most people, less experience with real pain, more numbed out.

In the 70s and 80s, on the other hand, they were more likely to know of that happening, or to have a real fear of it happening in their own communities. they didn't want to be reminded of it.

to a cocooners, reading about a horrible crime is like reading about some guy who got hit by lightning - it doesn't upset them because they think they will never come close to encountering something like that.

Not the case during a period of rising crime, where reading about bad stuff happening emotionally effects people much more.

"That's interesting, because nowadays its become very common to include that kind of stuff in cop dramas or to show it in the news."

We're getting into the lurid voyeurism that's more common in cocooning times. In the 70's and especially 80's, it became fairly common for TV shows to have occasional episodes where a (typically young) character is confronted by some unsavory trend or person, and eventually learns that their naivete could've gotten them hurt. By around 1994 these episodes were considered passé (I do seem to remember a 90210 episode involving underage drinking and/or gambling around this time); audiences were getting cynical and they wanted less ditzy characters.

It's telling to see how stories involving certain subjects have changed in tone and structure:

- Drugs and excessive drinking: 80's/early 90's, taken seriously. late 90's-present: treated flippantly or not mentioned at all.

- Sex crimes (pedophilia and rape): 80's/early 90's, dangers that could confront main characters, but the emphasis was on characters learning to fend off danger, not on the abuse itself and it's details. Late 90's-present: people are routinely killed, raped, molested, etc. The nature of the crime is explored and sometimes shown in detail (voyeurism), and the suggestion seems to be that we ought to just lock ourselves away to stay permanently safe from a horrible world. Whereas before the mid 90's, the suggestion was more that these things happen to some degree, like it or not, and we've got to face it and move on. We need to be aware of it, but not let it run our life either.

The Gen X-ers who were the target audience of these "message" shows back in the day tend to make fun of them decades later, not realizing that the zeitgeist of the prior era made adults concerned that kids were plunging headlong into dangerous territory and something, anything, had to be done to warn kids. People got more uptight and boring the further we got from the 80's, so why bother these days trying to make the TV set a half-assed babysitter for latch key kids? People don't have friends like they once did, they don't shop like they once, there's no longer a cultural division between mature adults, young adults, teens, and children like there was in the 70's-early 90's. Kids can veg out with video games and pointless social media crap, and adults spend so much time on keeping tabs on their kids.

Somewhat related is the change in characterization. In the 70's-early 90's, dramas were about earnest people. And comedies often had likable goofballs.

In the later 90's-present, dramas tend to focus on lugubrious characters (like Christian Bale in well, just about anything), while comedies tend to feature snarky know-it-alls.